Iranian Women Campaign To End Discriminatory Laws Against Them

Author : Judith Latham, VOA News

VOA News interviews Mahnaz Afkhami on Iran’s One Million Signatures Campaign, which seeks to change discriminatory laws against women. “Afkhami says the activists and their followers are extremely resilient, courageous, and inventive. ‘The reason the world heard so much about what was happening in Iran during the election is because of the sophisticated use of…

Face to Face with Mahnaz Afkhami

Author : Mehdi Falahati, Voice of America (Persian)

Voice of America’s “Rou dar Rou” (Face-to-Face) features Mahnaz Afkhami who sheds light on different periods of her life in Iran and the United States, beginning from when she was a university professor who founded the Association of University Women to the time she served as Secretary General of the Women’s Organization of Iran and…

Obama, Ahmadinejad, and the Women of Iran

Author : Mahnaz Afkhami, Women's Learning Partnership

This month, for the first time in 30 years, formal negotiations between the United States and Iran took place in a relatively positive atmosphere. As President Obama had promised during his campaign, dialogue took the place of diatribe. This is an important development. Why now and why during the term of the holocaust-denying, US-bashing President…

A Beaten Path

A Beaten Path

Author : Mahnaz Afkhami, The Berlin Journal (Number 18 Fall 2009)

At the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iran was a society organized on precepts that for centuries has defined the subordinate position of women as the natural order of things. The nascent civil society faced the issue of women mostly as a problem between traditionalism and modernism. But as the moderns grew in…

Executed But Not Forgotten: Iran’s Farrokhroo Parsay

Author : Liane Hansen, NPR

NPR interviews Mahnaz Afkhami about Farrokhroo Parsa, the Minister of Education in Iran from 1968 to 1977. Ms. Parsa was charged with corruption after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and executed on charges of corruption. In the interview, Afkhami discusses  the role that Ms. Parsay played as both her personal mentor and as a pioneer for…